Ignorance of the political and media elites is often helpful. For example, if the agreement on principles to resolve the boundary dispute, announced during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao last year, were put to the same political scrutiny as the Indo-US nuclear deal, the UPA government would have been pilloried for violating the 1962 parliamentary resolution on the boundary dispute.

Ignorance hurts too — like in the nervous public reaction to the comments by the Chinese envoy in New Delhi that Arunachal Pradesh belongs to China. The foreign office was fully aware that the envoy was merely stating a long-standing position; that is of no use in dealing with the kind of reaction it generated. The truth is that a political deal on mutual boundary concessions has been at hand for some time. But neither leadership has bothered to intervene at the right moment to clinch it. Thanks to the formalism and the lack of personal intimacy, there is no culture of personal communication at the top. If Bush has the time to pick up the phone and call the Indian PM every so often, why is it that Hu and Dr Singh can’t do the same?

Even more tragic has been the reluctance of the two political leaderships to confront the enduring political differences and a preference instead to hide behind vacuous rhetoric of ‘Panchsheel’, ‘Asian solidarity’, and a ‘multipolar world’. India talks of strategic cooperation, but denies visas to Chinese businessmen and mindlessly blocks investments it so badly needs. China talks of partnership, but opposes Indo-US nuclear deal even as it prepares to offer new nuclear reactors to Pakistan.

... contd.